Time Out
by Ieyre
Summary: One of the first things that Baelfire learned from Peter Pan was that you never tried to join his games after they began. Pan comes to see a captured Neal, and hear out his attempts to talk his way into tagging "in." Written largely before 3X04 aired, a now AU take on Pan and Neal's first meeting in the Neverland of present day.


**This was written before "Nasty Habits" aired, based on the vaguest hunch from the promo that Felix had Neal locked up and Pan actually let him out. Didn't happen that way, but the emotional beats remain, and Pan monologuing at/Freudian analyzing the Stiltskins is my new favorite thing on the show, so I offer this up as a what-if AU first meeting between Pan and Bae.**

Fruitless though it was, Neal would only stop pounding the rock in his left hand against the oversized padlock when the motion stopped feeling so damn satisfying.

_Six seconds._

That's how long he'd been a free agent in Neverland. A couple hundred years of life, almost two decades of adulthood, Emma, a _kid…_and he'd lasted six seconds longer than he had the first time he was here. Felix was _still_ taller than him, heaping humiliation onto the crap pile that was this situation.

_Emma would have kept a hairpin in her back pocket. _The thought gave him an extra surge of strength, and the rock shattered into a dozen pieces which ricocheted in every direction, including in his face.

"_Shit_!" He looked down the source of the shooting pain in his left hand; he'd managed to completely split his thumbnail in an active of utterly pointless defiance. _Great_. "_Son_ of a _—_"

"That's not a very nice thing to say."

His hand and blood froze. Neal did not look up, did not _need _to, for he could pick that voice out of a crowd of a hundred; sometimes its laughter woke him up at four in the morning, drenched in a cold sweat.

"You've never been much of a believer. If you _believed_," the voice stressed, mockingly. "You wouldn't need to _break _it. You could, let's say…turn the lock into a meringue and _eat_ your way through."

"I prefer to do things the old-fashioned way."

The boy who the voice belonged to took a step towards the exposed bamboo bars.

"Now where's the fun in that?"

He was so close that Neal could feel hot breath on his neck—he flinched and raised his head, almost involuntarily. Staring back at him was the puckish and guileless face of Peter Pan, the Boy Who Never Grew Up.

"Welcome home, Bae."

"This isn't home and I don't feel very welcome." Peter's mouth turned upwards, with that smile Neal recognized instantly—the one that made you think of a kid pulling the wings off of butterflies.

"It's the closest thing to a home _you've_ ever had." He leaned in even closer, making his captive feel like a caged animal. "Once a lost boy, always a lost boy—though you've never been very good at staying lost, have you, Baelfire?"

"Felix found me pretty quick. Is he on orphan collection detail nowadays?

"Don't be ridiculous. I don't send greeting parties to anyone but my _guests of honor_." Pan had pulled an apple out of the air, and was polishing it against his leg, leisurely. "I thought I was being obliging."

"_Obliging_? How the hell did you _oblige_—"

"By sending the shadow to come fetch you in the Enchanted Forest, of course." Pan watched the blood drain from Baelfire's face with visible pleasure. "Why you bothered using that outlaw's brat as bait is _beyond _me…you could have just summoned him yourself, you know. You'll always be welcome here."

"You…you didn't."

"I _did_."

"You got me to Neverland—" The false bravado he'd admitted to an 18-year-old Emma was his "scared shitless" voice came out in full effect; half of him wanted to shrink into the corner and the other half felt like challenging Peter Pan to a shots-off in the Neverland branch of Bennigan's. "Now what are you going to do with me? Why the _cage_?"

"It's a penalty box," the boy corrected, patting one of the bars. "Those who try to join my games _late_ pay the price. Don't worry, I promise it's just for a turn."

"Where'_s_ my _son_?"

Neal's sharpness stung Pan, and he grasped his heart, wounded.

"You _know_ where he is—it's where he belongs. I was just having an interesting little chat with him, actually." He threw the apple inhumanely high in the air and caught it in the other hand. "About _you_."

"What about Emma?" he demanded, not taking the bait. "If you hurt her—"

"Emma's fine. Why are you so concerned about _her_?" Peter Pan paused with what could only be described as dramatic _relish_. "I thought you had a…_fiancée._"

"She's got nothing to do with—" he stopped himself, abruptly. "What…what do you know about it?"

"I know more than you'd think."

"Tamara…" Every moment of the whirlwind relationship played in his head backwards, an old VHS tape rewound, then fast-forwarded again, the edges staticky and uneven…a spilled _venti_ coffee, followed by two bottles of cheap cabernet shared in the basement of what she'd described as a too "twee" Soho studio, the camping trip to the Adirondacks where the tent poles broke and they slept beneath the stars, Christmas last year, her flight to Cincinnati getting snowed out and spending it curled up in her apartment, just the two of them—for the first time since Emma he'd felt like he really _had _something, and it had been that feeling he'd clung to as he fumbled with a ring box under the table at Giotto's only two months later, _that _feeling that had given him the courage that, in his heart of hearts, he'd never really believed he had.

"She was working for you the whole time."

"It was so _easy…_you aren't exactly difficult to please. You wanted _so hard_ to believe that someone could love you best, put _you _first, you did most of the work for me."

Neal swallowed hard.

"How'd you find me?"

"That's the funny thing about lost boys. They're really only lost when they're here. Everywhere else they're just…scared little children running away." His arms dropped to his sides, leaden, the hurt hand all but forgotten. "Looks like you've just run in a circle, Bae."

"Let me out."

"Why should I?"

"You _promised_," he reminded the boy, pointedly.

"That's right—and I will. Eventually." Pan really looked the man he'd caught for the first time, appraising the tattered shirt and unkempt bear. "Is that _gray hair_?" He sounded revolted.

"It's what happens when you grow up."

He waved a hand, as though he found the whole subject distasteful.

"It won't do. _You _won't do, not like that. Not _old._" The apple that disappeared was suddenly back in his hand; Peter spun it on one finger like a basketball.

"You may be in denial about adulthood, but the rest of the world—universe, whatever—isn't."

"Tell me, what good has growing up done _you_, Baelfire? Gray hair and wrinkles, a dull job in the city, a fiancée who never loved you—you're just as alone and in my power as you've _ever_ been." Neal opened and closed his mouth—at a loss. "But don't worry. I may be able to make a boy out of this man yet."

The inference was unmistakable.

"Your magic can't do that. Time's frozen here." Pan tilted his head in bemusement, and his certainty wavered. "There's no way—that's the only thing you _can't _mess with."

Peter shrugged. Neal's panic was of as little concern to him as time itself.

"You're right—_I _can't. But I'm not the only one on this island."

Beneath the childish breeziness was the hint of a threat—one that sent a familiar prickling up Neal's spine. He shook it off. You couldn't trust feelings in the real world, but in Neverland…feelings were Pan's weapon. The boy was a lightening rod for all of your worst fears.

"Just let me out. I know you're going to eventually."

"How?"

"Because this is boring, and if there's something you hate more than my happiness, it's being _bored_."

Pan stared at him for a long moment, then let loose a crow of laughter.

"I'm glad we understand each other, Bae." The familiar name curdled in the boy's mouth. "You're right, you're very dull like this. I _will _let you out…"

Neal breathed in—and a sudden, violent drop in the temperature of the jungle burned his lungs. This place changed with its' prince's mood, and that meant that something had changed in him.

The boy smiled evilly.

"On one condition."

"What do you want?"

"To see how you'll work together. I'll release you—into someone's caring arms. It's not Felix, don't worry."

"Emma—"

"No," Pan interrupted sharply. "Someone else. An old _friend_. He'll hold onto you for me, keep a _grip_—well, hopefully." He laughed at some private joke. "You know what they say about old habits."

"I can handle him, whoever it is."

"I know. You're the only person who could." Then Pan surprised him by reaching through the bars of the cage and patting him on the shoulder, gently. The gesture of a playmate, and Neal, pressed as hard as possible to the back wall of his prison, could not recoil from it. "I really _am_ glad to have you back—I mean it."

He and the cage vanished.

Before he had time to think, Neal was running.


End file.
